They wanted to play another piece for the three visitors. As the tro player swept the bow across the only remaining string of his upright fiddle, Teera suddenly realized why the night before she’d woken up crying in the dark: she was bringing to completion something she’d started decades earlier, something interrupted at the borderland by the fear of death around her. A lamentation for the homeland she was about to abandon.
As they walked slowly back to the entrance where their ride awaited, meandering the long way around, Teera told Narunn about her desperate flight a lifetime ago from Kompong Cham to the jungle of Siem Reap, the ghostly tremor that’d stirred her to waking, the quiver of her own heart she’d mistaken for phantom music. About a boy named Chea, a soldier who, at the fall of the Khmer Rouge, had scurried her and Amara across the rice fields and forests not so far from where they were now, guiding their steps through the interstices of land mines, and delivered them to safety at the refugee camp in Thailand, only to turn around again to help others. Chea was from Siem Reap, a native of Phum Kruos. For years, once the country had become stable again, her aunt had sent letter after letter from America to government offices here, inquiring about him. She’d pursued every possible contact, paid people to search for him, but all led to nothing. When Teera herself had first arrived in Cambodia, she too had contacted the census office in Siem Reap to see whether they had any records of anyone with that name and history. And she’d been forced to accept anew that there were those whose fates she would never know. Now, having heard the musicians and their stories, she feared Chea, who’d carried her as explosives detonated all around, and had probably helped many others escape in the same way, might’ve lost his own life to those remnants of abandoned battlefields. The injustice of it was more than Teera could bear.
Narunn took her hand and squeezed it. “But perhaps like them, like these musicians, your friend could’ve survived an explosion. If he’s still alive, if he’s somewhere in the country—or in this world—it’s not impossible to cross paths with him again.”
Teera stared at him, astounded by the steadiness with which he clung to every possibility of life, seen and unseen, despite all he’d lost, or perhaps because of it. An emotion overwhelmed her. She felt profoundly indebted to the forces that had kept him alive, that had willed his path toward hers.
“In the meantime, we keep searching . . .”
*
The river widens, spreading open like a fan. Suddenly they emerge into the oceanic vastness of the Tonle Sap Lake. There is no discernible shoreline in front of them, only the boundless undulation of blue and green, interspersed with reflections of the clouds, birds in flight. Here and there outlines of something solid materialize—shoals, sandbars?—only to dissolve completely when a flock of cranes or ibis break the surface of the water. Narunn stops rowing, letting the tips of the oars drop like anchors. He turns to face Teera, and a look passes between them. Tuk tov . . . kompong nov.
The boat departs . . . but the harbor remains.
As always, there were two guards, one keeping watch at the closed door, and the other doing the interrogator’s bidding. A moment earlier, with his blindfold removed, Tun had noticed that the small square window lined with iron bars was now boarded up. Aside from a muted sliver of sunlight piercing through a gap between the boards, he could no longer see the expansive tree trunk whose rooted presence he’d often fixed his gaze on as violence rained down upon him. He noticed always with renewed horror the wall of instruments, their ready compliance, the singular inviolable code of conduct. You must not scream under any circumstance. The words mocked him. His eyes frantically searched for something to focus on—some sign that there existed a world beyond this absolute hell. He found nothing, save for the sliver of light. He heard their question but couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth to speak.
They were asking whether or not he wanted to eat. Cee reu min cee? His first impulse was to shield his face, clamp his hands over his lips, shut them tight. But his wrists, like his ankles, were bound behind him, as he was made to kneel on the tile floor. He shook his head vehemently, idiotically, anticipating the excrement they would feed him, as they had the last few sessions. Yet, he didn’t remember seeing the bucket in the room, couldn’t detect any fresh stench besides his own fear. Still, they could beat him until he defecated and make him eat his own shit. “Arh’aing cee reu min cee?” the guard standing next to him demanded, echoing the chief interrogator. They no longer addressed him as “comrade.” Arh’aing was what you’d call a leech, a worm, anything other than a human. The guard grabbed his hair and pulled his head back so that his mouth was agape to receive whatever they would force down his throat. Tun wanted to plead, but he could barely swallow, his windpipe suddenly hardened as if coated with cement. Again, the chief interrogator murmured, with violent calm, “Cee reu min cee? It’s a simple question. And really, there’s only one answer. Just say it, and it’ll be over.”
Suddenly the end of a bludgeon smashed his left eye, like the force of a steel ball. “CEE!” he screamed in agony, falling to the floor, the side of his face smacking the hard tiles, his protruding cheekbone shattering as if bones were made of powder. “CEE!” Yes, he’d devour his own excrement like the cur he was! He’d eat anything! His own rotting flesh if he must! Whatever they said, he’d obey.
He whimpered, disgusted by his weakness, yet unable to rise from the floor, from his debasement. He wanted only to press his smashed eye to the guard’s bare foot and still the pain against the warmth of another’s flesh. He was certain his eyeball had detached and embedded itself in the back of his skull. The freshness of pain, its rawness and intensity, shocked him as much as it hurt. He’d expected that by now he’d be used to it, his nerves numbed by the repetition of abuse, the severity of impact. He’d thought that at some point pain would reach a level the body could no longer translate into words or awareness. That he would no longer be able to identify it, just lose himself in a paroxysm, like a splinter in an immense explosion.
The guard kicked him, shaking his foot loose of the despicable heap he’d become. “Now you’ve admitted the truth,” the chief interrogator said from his perch on the edge of his desk, one leg swinging nonchalantly, “what exactly did you do for the CIA?”
Tun reeled. He’d misunderstood. A trick of the tongue. A foreign intrusion into his own language, a language, though innate as breathing itself, that had become alien to him. C, not cee. Even a single letter could be a trap, ensnaring a victim into self-condemnation.
“Everything,” Tun lied through his shattered skull, his battered eye, already swollen shut. “Everything the CIA wanted me to do. I was their lackey, their spying dog . . .”